|
The History of the Amiga Part 1: The Early Days Part 2: The Commodore Years Part 3: The P.C. Era |
|
The History of the Amiga: Part 3
(page 2) The 3.5 announcement seemed to pacify the Amiga community for awhile. Since the Commodore bankruptcy, Amiga users, not necessarily masters of their own domain, had become masters of the waiting game, and this gave them something new to wait for. Alas, when the second half of 1998 rolled around, there was no new OS release in sight. Surprise, surprise. Amiga International had missed their first of many deadlines. Gateway knew they needed to do something to silence the growing rumblings, so in September of 98 they formed a second subsidiary called Amiga Incorporated. It was announced that Amiga International would be in charge of sales and marketing and Amiga Inc would focus on future development for the Amiga. It is important to point out at this time that hardware development in the Amiga realm was not entirely inert. Even though nothing was coming out of Amiga itself, 3rd party companies did their best to hack new hardware onto the old Amiga hardware. It was far from an ideal solution, but it was something, and kept old Amiga's at least useable. The two most important areas of development were PPC boards and graphics cards. Phase 5 technologies decided to take it upon themselves to bring PPC to the Amiga in the form of 68k/PPC coprocessor boards. The OS still ran on the 68k chip but apps written for the board would use the PPC through a special ppc library. On the video front, 3rd party video cards gave the Amiga true 24bit support. Unfortunately, the various bankruptcies and general lack of development from the Amiga's line of parent companies had long since scared away any real software developers, leaving only scattered hobbyists and lone programmers to provide all 3rd party software for the platform. Even infamous coder "Ook", author of new8n1.device, retired to obscurity during this time. So it was that when Doom went open source and a port came out for the Amiga, it was big news. The Amiga, once the first system to get the top games, was celebrating the port of a 5 year old PC game. It was a sad day, but many Amiga fans were so starved for decent software at this point that they didn't notice the implications.
1999: Our Cover is Blown Gateway had managed to string the Amiga faithful along for a couple of years and finally decided they could start to reveal their insidious plans. So far, Gateway had maintained the popular notion that the Amiga would move to PPC. They seemed to change their mind on an almost weekly basis on how this would be accomplished, but generally it involved no direct action or investment on their part. One example of this was an announcement posted on the Amiga Inc site officially endorsing Phase5's PPC boards as the official future of the platform, only to rescind the statement a week later stating that the message had been posted without approval. They were clearly running a tight ship. In reality, the digital convergence project didn't need PPC. Gateway began to reveal their cards and announced their digital convergence plans to a somewhat incredulous Amiga community. Gateway wasn't insane though, and kept alive the notion that their would be a next generation system in coordination with the digital convergence stuff. It was announced that the new Amiga would use a top-secret processor and use a third party kernel for the OS. This, of course, led to widespread rampant speculation. Amiga users by now had proven to be the masters of widespread rampant speculation. Gateway, for their part, had proven to be the masters of distraction. There was also talk of an unnamed chip, dubbed MMC (Monster Mystery Chip) by the Amiga community. Performance indicators, likely produced out of thin air, suggested the chip was capable of 400 million pixels/second. So let's sum up: The next generation Amiga would use a mystery CPU, have a mystery chipset, and use an unrevealed OS kernel. Fittingly enough, it would also have phantom users, since it never ended up being produced.
Soon, Amiga Inc released a road map for how they would accomplish their dubious plans. A developers system was said to be released in November, and creative Amiga users dubbed it the "November Box". In a controversial move, however, the developers system would use an x86 Intel processor. This led to an outcry from the anti-pc denizens of the Amiga community who feared they'd no longer be able to wear their nifty "Intel Outside" t-shirts and headbands. The guys with the "Intel Outside" tattoos on their asses proved to be absolutely inconsolable. The word "betrayal" was bandied about, and Amiga Inc rushed to reassure everyone that the x86 system was just a transitional thing. The final version, they said, would run on a yet unrevealed processor. This silenced some, but there were still grumblings. Especially among the aforementioned tattooed people. The developers system would run a beta version of AmigaOS called AmigaOS 4.0, and it too would merely be transitional. The final finished product would be labeled AmigaOS5.0 and would be released in 2000 with the new Amiga. After rumors of a deal falling through with Be to provide the mystery OS kernal for the new OS, it was eventually announced that QNX would be the new OS partner. Amiga users quickly jumped on the QNX bandwagon and proclaimed it to be the greatest thing since QNX. Time passed, as it has been known to, and 9 months later QNX released screenshots of the new system they claimed to have been working on for Amiga enthusiasts. This created some excitement among the Amiga faithful. 9 months of speculation and finally something that looked like progress! We were on our way now!
The very next day, however, Amiga issued an announcement that QNX were no longer the OS partner for the AmigaNG. Instead they would use the Linux kernel. Amiga users cried out in unholy outrage and rioted in the virtual streets. Amiga users had had 9 months to fall in love with the notion of the scalable and much respected QNX, and merely 24 hours after finally seeing some screenshots they had been told it was not to be. The linux kernal was viewed as monolithic in comparison, and seemed to be an indication that Amiga was starting at square one again. In fact, it is not entirely clear why Gateway had a falling out with QNX. Ultimately, it didn't matter. Gateway, remember, had only started this whole thing to play around with set top boxes and piss off Microsoft. An entire book could be written about the final moves of the Gateway era, and if Stephen King ever writes it, I suggest waiting to see the movie. It sort of played out like this: Gateway Executive #1: "Sweet Lincoln's mullet! This set top box idea is sounding like it's taking off. IBM just announced that the pc as we know it is dead. We'd better not let this Amiga thing get away from us." Gateway Executive #2: "Yes, there's only one logical thing to do. Let's fire everyone and put someone else in charge. Then let's cut his budget to almost nothing." Which is exactly what they did. And then Microsoft announced they were working on something called the Xbox... Gateway Executive #1: "Great Caesars Ghost! Did you hear? Microsoft has caught on to the set top box thing. They're making something called the Xbox. It even has box in the title! Ours doesn't have box in the title! We're doomed!" Gateway Executive #2: "Sweet Zombie Jesus! Get rid of the Amiga shit fast. We don't want Gates pissing on our graves." And so, after a long period of painful silence, it was announced that Amiga had been sold once again. This time to a company called Amino which had been formed for the sole purpose of buying the assets. The company consisted of former Amiga employees hired during the Gateway era, led by Bill McEwen and Fleecy Moss. Alas, 7 years after the Commodore bankruptcy, Amiga was starting over once again.
Unfortunately, since McEwen and Moss had entered the Amiga scene during the Gateway era, their perception of where to take the company was the same as Gateway's. Amino, after taking the name Amiga Inc, proceeded to pursue plans to continue the Amiga Developer Environment, an attempt to use the Amiga name for portable devices and whatever else the current buzz word was. How did they do this? By announcing strategic partnerships, using marketing double talk, and generally not actually producing anything. The Amiga would have been truly done for if not for one simple decision. Amiga Inc, while they slowly pissed away investment capital, decided they would license the old Amiga OS and related technology to whoever wanted it. A company named Hyperion, which had carved a niche porting old PC games to the Amiga, stepped forward and acquired the license to AmigaOS. They would attempt to do what had been proposed for years and never accomplished. They would port AmigaOS to PPC and implement modern features. More importantly, the nature of their agreement with Amiga Inc insured that they would be able to finish their project even if Amiga Inc went bankrupt and ceased to function, something which seemed increasingly likely. Of course, the new OS would be useless without accompanying hardware. A UK computer retailer stepped forward and announced they would produce a motherboard for the new OS called the AmigaOne. This all sounded like great news, but the Amiga community had been promised these things before and seen it all go south. And when I say south, I mean well passed the Mason Dixon line. Why should they believe it this time? By 2003, the initial AmigaOne motherboards were in user's hands, and though they had to run Linux initially, it was the first time in about a decade that new Amiga hardware had been produced. By 2004, beta versions of OS4 were released and Amiga users rejoiced. Well, the few that were left rejoiced. Everyone else in the world completely failed to notice. 2005 finally saw a PPC Amiga the likes of which Petro had first intimated 8 years before. But was it too late? OS4 was a huge upgrade to OS3.1 which had been released over a decade earlier, but the Amiga no longer had the huge technical advantage it had in 1985. And of course, all of the third party developers were long since gone. If Amiga was going to make a comeback, something strange and unforeseen would have to happen. Which pretty much brings our story to the present. Where do things go from here? Only time will tell. So go put your radiation suit on, have a burrito, and check back here in 20 years.
|
other URL, you may be the target of a massive conspiracy the likes of which we haven't seen for years.
Site Designed/Maintained by TheGrimReaper^cF